Reflections on Seeing a Magpie

Mick Robertson and Jenny Hanley on set

of the Thames TV show Magpie (c. 1977)

 

 

I. 

 

Whenever I see a magpie, I think of the ornithomantic nursery rhyme which offers a series of binary oppositions in which one term is more highly valued than the other.

Such metaphysical privileging - be it in the field of emotions, biology, or metallurgy - is politically unacceptable to those who reject all forms of hierarchy based upon violence and subordination, but it's also philosophically untenable for those who, like Nietzsche, recognise that joy and sorrow, for example, are related and grow together; that attempting to reduce the latter will also diminish the other.

 

Thus, for Nietzsche, whoever wants the happiness associated with two magpies, must affirm the grief and suffering associated with a single bird [1]. 

 

 

II.

 

But whenever I see a magpie, I also think of the children's TV show of this name that was broadcast on ITV from July 1968 until June 1980, providing a much hipper (and unscripted) alternative to Blue Peter over on the BBC - who wants Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves when you can have Jenny Hanley and Mick Robertson?  

Mick may have been a bit of a hippie and a Brian May lookalike, but he was younger and way cooler than Purves (in my eyes at least). 

 

And as for the English actress Jenny Hanley - who some readers may recall as the Irish Girl in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), or as Sarah, in the classic Hammer horror Scars of Dracula (1970), or even as Magda, Lord Brett Sinclair's new valet in the final episode of The Persuaders! (1972) - well, she was almost too sexy for a twice-weekly tea-time kids programme and is remembered fondly by many male viewers of a certain age.     

 

Murgatroyd - the show's logo and mascot

 

Notes

 

[1] See The Gay Science I. 12 wherein Niezsche asks his readers to imagine pleasure and its opposite tied together in such a manner whoever desired to have as much happiness as possible must also accept a maximum of suffering. But note, Nietzsche is not arguing that suffering is in some manner justified or vindicated by happiness. Later, in Zarathustra, Nietzsche will absorb this idea into his concept of the eternal recurrence.  

 

For a related post to this one - 'One for Sorrow ...' (18 October, 2023) - please click here.  

 

Just Do It: Notes on Incitement with Reference to the Case of Danvers Vs de Winter

Joan Fontaine as Mrs de Winter and Judith Anderson 

as Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) [a]

 

 

I. 

 

As a provocateur, I'm naturally interested in the concept of incitement, which is usually seen negatively and in contradistinction to the more seductive-sounding idea of enticement. 

 

Those with a background in the law will be quick to point out that to incite is, in legal terms, to actively encourage another person to commit a criminal act, whether or not that person carries such out. 

 

Interestingly, incitement now seems to be taken more seriously - to be seen as more sinful - than the deed itself [b]. In other words, it's as if thinking and communicating evil thoughts were more grievous than actually doing bad things. After all, sticks and stones may break our bones, but it's hurty words that cause emotional damage.

 

Such moral logic explains the current obsession with so-called hate speech and why some people are now investigated by the police for non-crime hate incidents when actual criminals are being let out of jail early or not being prosecuted at all. 

 

The rationale seems to be if the police intervene before a criminal act has taken place and actual harm caused, then that has to be a good thing. But if in practice that means curtailing free speech and locking people us for what they post online, that's highly debatable.

 

Having said that, speech is a type of action, of course, and I'm not denying that incitement can be malevolent and trolls who encourage others - particularly individuals in a vulnerable state - to serious self-harm or suicide probably deserve to have their speech curtailed (if not to be branked, indeed). 

And that includes Mrs Danvers, the head housekeeper at Manderley and a woman morbidly devoted to the memory of her adored mistress Rebecca ...

 

 

II. 

 

Arguably, the most disturbing scene in Daphne de Maurier's brilliant novel Rebecca comes in chapter eighteen on the morning after the costume ball, when Mrs de Winter decides to confront Mrs Danvers. 

 

At first, the former, having overcome her fear of the latter, has the advantage. But that soon changes, as the angry colour returns to the dead white face of Mrs Danvers and she begins to rant and rave like a mad woman; "her long fingers twisting and tearing the black stuff of her long dress" [c]. 

 

There's nothing Mrs de Winter can do but watch with fascinated horror; the sight of Mrs Danvers dry sobbing with mouth open making her shudder and feel physically ill. Growing increasingly insane, the latter advances towards the former, backing her towards the open window, and gripping her arm. 

 

"'It's you that ought to be lying there in the church crypt [...] It's you who ought to be dead [...]'", she hisses. [276]

 

The young Mrs de Winter recalls and narrates the scene of incitement for us:

 

"She pushed me  towards the open window. I could see the terrace below me grey and indistinct in the white wall of fog. 'Look down there,' she said. 'It's easy, isn't it? Why don't you jump? It wouldn't hurt, not to break your neck. It's a quick, kind way. It's not like drowning. Why don't you try it? Why don't you go?'

      The fog filled the open windows, damp and clammy, it stung my eyes, it clung to my nostrils. I held on to the window-sill with my hands.

      'Don't be afraid,' said Mrs Danvers. 'I won't push you. I won't stand by you. You can jump of your own accord. What's the use of your staying here at Manderley? You're not happy. Mr de Winter doesn't love you. There's not much for you to live for, is there? Why don't you jump now and have done with it? Then you won't be unhappy any more.'" [276]  

       

 

III,

 

That's certainly incitement to suicide; cleverly expressed as a series of rhetorical questions. Fortunately, however, Mrs de Winter doesn't jump (she's not so much saved by the bell as by a flare or rocket sent up by a ship in distress). 

 

And interestingly, not only does she not want to get the rozzers involved and wish to press legal charges against Mrs Danvers, she doesn't even ask her husband to sack her, having decided that the latter has lost her power over her: "Whatever she said or did now it could not matter to me or hurt me. I knew she was my enemy and I did not mind." [327] 

 

I'm not sure if that's Christian forgiveness born of a spirit of love, or if this refusal to take her enemy seriously and not only forgive but forget wrongs done to her is a sign of a more aristocratic nature [d]. Either way, it's admirable and I wish more people were like this in a world in which there is a growing tendency to criminalise conduct in the name of legal moralism. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] To watch this scene on YouTube, click here.

 

[b] Incitement falls into that category of crimes known as inchoate; i.e., ones that prepare the way for, further, or encourage a crime. Just as one can be convicted of conspiracy, so too can one be convicted of incitement (for example, using words and images to stir up hatred against others that may lead to violence against them). 

      In the UK, incitement was abolished as an offence under the common law of England in 2008, but was replaced with three new statutory offences of encouraging or assisting crime under the Serious Crime Act (2007).

 

[c] Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (Virago Press, 2003), p. 271. Future page references given in the post are to this edition of the novel. 

 

[d] In the first essay (§10) of his Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche writes that to be incapable of taking one's enemies seriously for very long is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to forget. 

 

 

Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas (2024)

I. 

 

Regular readers will recall that back in April of this year, I went along to the Horse Hospital to view the overtly political artwork of Gee Vaucher and hear what she had to say about her time working with Crass (an anarcho-hippie collective based at Dial House in Essex and masquerading as punks during the period 1977-1984): click here.  

And they might also recall that in September of this year, I visited the Richard Saltoun Gallery, in Mayfair, to view a solo exhibition by Penny Slinger; another British-born artist who likes to combine elements of surrealism with (feminist-informed sexual) politics and another woman now aged in her seventies (at 77, she's just two years younger than Vaucher): click here. 

 

Anyway, completing this trio of septuagenarian female artists is Marlene Dumas (71), whose solo exhibition of sixteen new(ish) works at the Frith Street Gallery - including the large (100 x 30 cm) canvas pictured here entitled Mourning Marsyas - I went to see earlier this week ... [1] 

 

II.

 

For those, like me, whose knowledge of ancient mythology is patchy at best (but who aren't fortunate enough to have the Little Greek on hand to fill in the gaps), Marsyas was the satyr who - skilled as he was on the double pipe (αὐλός) - mistakenly challenged Apollo to a contest to determine who was the best musician. 

 

All-too-predictably, the Muses found in favour of the latter, and Apollo, proving that the only thing worse than a bad loser is a vindictive winner, punished Marsyas by skinning him alive [2].  

 

There are, I suppose, numerous ways we might interpret this story. But Dumas - who was born and grew up in South Africa during apartheid - always likes to side with the victim, be that Christ hanging on his Cross or a dead member of the Red Army Faction.

 

Thus, for Dumas, Apollo is the villain and Marsyas symbolises not hubris, but the right of the individual to freely express themselves artistically. And so she mourns Marsyas and all others who have died in their attempt to challenge those wielding power and authority. 

 

I've seen it suggested that there's a certain tenderness in Dumas's canvas which is missing from the savage beauty of Titian's Flaying Marsyas painted 470 years earlier. And that might be the case: or it might be pity which is on display here, which is an altogether different thing (often confused with compassion) [3]. 

 

It's a shame that Iris Murdoch isn't around to consult on this question [4]. 

 

 

III. 

 

All in all, I like Dumas's paintings; created, according to the gallery press release, 'through a mixture of chance and intention [...] combining very fast and focused actions with reflective pauses'. 

 

What that means is that Dumas often pours paint directly onto the canvas and then goes from there, teasing out a central figure or a face. Sometimes these figures and faces appear in an instant, whilst at other times they require careful consideration [5].

 

Strangely, despite Dumas openly confessing that her works are "'heavy with the weight of a bad conscience, deceased lovers, past failures and present atrocities'" [6], I found the exhibition quite refreshing; perhaps Nietzsche was right after all and cruelty is indeed one of the oldest festive joys of mankind [7].       

 

Apart from the central work after which the exhibition took its name, there were several other works that caught my eye, including a phallic picture consisting of a pair of big black cocks and a smaller canvas commemorating the 69 people killed at a summer camp on the island of Utøya in July 2011 by the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik (what this tells us about her and/or me readers can decide).

 

 

Marlene Dumas: Two Gods (2021) Oil on canvas (150 x 140 cm) 

and Utøya (2018-2023) Oil on canvas (40 x 50 cm) 

Photos by Peter Cox courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

   

 

Notes

 

[1] Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas opened at the Frith Street Gallery (Golden Square) on 20 September and finishes on 16 November 2024. Full details can be found by clicking here. 

 

[2] For those readers keen to know further details, the story of Marsyas can be found in Book VI (lines 382-400) of Ovid's Metamorphoses: click here for a translation by A. S. Kline (2000) on poetryintranslation.com 

 

[3] Nietzsche famously viewed pity as a dangerous pathological condition that weakens the pitier and degrades the pitied. It is thus a form of practical nihilism disguised as a moral virtue. Compassion, on the other hand, is a feeling with the one who suffers; not a feeling for and is born of a true love for others as well as a love of fate. 

      Readers who wish to know more on this might like to see the essay by Suzanne Obdrzalek, 'On the Contrast between Pity and Compassion in Nietzsche', in Aporia, Vol. 7 ( BYU, 1997), pp. 59-72. It can be downloaded and read as a pdf by clicking here.

 

[4] The Irish-British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was a huge fan of Titian's late masterpiece (painted c. 1570-76), once describing it as the greatest of all works of art in the Western tradition in that it manages to touch on life in all its ambiguity, horror, and misery whilst, at the same time, being a beautiful work that invests the human story with something divine. 

 

[5] It's not surprising to discover that Dumas often refers to the concept of pareidolia when discussing her work; i.e., the psychological phenomenon by which the brain is given to perceive meaningful images (such as faces) in random visual stimuli. I have written on this phenomenon in a post dated 4 June 2015: click here. 

 

[6] Dumas writing in an introductory essay to the Mourning Marsyas exhibition and cited by Adrian Searle in his interview with her in The Guardian (23 September 2023): click here. 

 

[7] See Nietzsche, Morgenröthe (1881), I. 18. Translated into English by R. J. Hollingdale as Daybreak (Cambridge University Press, 1982).  

 

Marlene Dumas

marlenedumas.nl 

frithstreetgallery.com

And Then This: More Random Thoughts on Samuel Beckett

Stephen Alexander: God Save Samuel Beckett (2024) 

(à la Jamie Reid) [1]

 

 

There are many reasons other than his dark humour and finely crafted words to admire the esteemed Irish writer Samuel Beckett; not least of all the fact that he was stylish, courageous, and free from the spirit of revenge ... 

 

 

Samuel Beckett: Style Icon 

 

With the possible exception of Albert Camus, Sam Beckett was the best-looking of all those twentieth-century intellectuals troubled by questions of nihilism, absurdism, and existentialism. 

 

Already as a sports mad teen, he'd adopted the classic sharp haircut that he was to favour for the rest of his life. I'm not quite sure whether we should refer to his Barnet as coiffed or quiffed, but, either way, it's inspired generations of stylish young men ever since (although as one commentator notes, a thick head of hair is a prerequisite if you really want to achieve the look) [2].  

 

And then there are the glasses: once Beckett found a small, round, steel-rimmed pair of specs that perfectly suited his face and signalled his fierce intelligence, he again stuck with them for life.

 

As for his clothes, Beckett initially liked to wear suits that appeared just a little too tight and ill-fitting, but he eventually settled for a look featuring a simple pair of slacks worn with a turtleneck sweater and a sports jacket. Beckett also had a penchant for raincoats, French berets, and soft suede shoes: "In fact, such was the staying power of this particular ensemble that to this day Beckett continues to be cited as a paragon of uniform dressing." [3]        

 

Ultimately, despite claiming he had no interest in fashion, Beckett was something of a dandy who understood the importance of style and who blurred the line between smart casual and shabby chic. He may have picked up some pieces from the local charity shop, but he matched them with expensive silk scarves and famously liked to be seen carrying a Gucci shoulder bag in the 1970s. 

 

 

Samuel Becket: Hero of the Resistance

 

Unlike that cowardly toad Jean-Paul Sartre - who basically sat out the German Occupation of France during the Second World War and whose role in La Résistance was, at best, what might be described as modest rather than fully engaged - Beckett, a resident of Paris for most of his adult life, was an active member of the Resistance (working as a courier) and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre in March 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle [4]. 

 

It has to be remembered that, as an Irishman, Beckett could have easily returned to Dublin from Paris when the Germans invaded in 1941. But he didn't. He stayed. And he joined the Resistance, frequently risking arrest by the Gestapo. After his unit was betrayed in August 1942, Beckett was forced to flee to the South of France, seeking refuge in the small village of Rousillion. Here, he worked on a farm, but still took part in operations against the German forces when called upon to do so.

 

After the Germans were defeated and France was liberated, Beckett returned to Paris. After the War, he rarely spoke of his experiences and would often downplay his role in the Resistance (again, cf. Sartre), describing his activities as no more than boy scout stuff. 

 

Samuel Beckett: Overcoming the Spirit of Revenge

 

In January 1938, Beckett was almost fatally stabbed when he refused the services of a notorious Parisian pimp who went by the (slightly ironic) name of Prudent. 

 

After recovering in a private hospital room - generously paid for by his former mentor James Joyce - Beckett attended a preliminary court hearing at which he asked his assailant why he had not only pulled a knife on him, but plunged the blade into his chest. 

 

Prudent replied: Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse. 

 

Taken aback somewhat by Prudent's honesty in admitting that he lacked any explanation for his actions (i.e., any logical motive) - coupled to his well-mannered request for forgiveness - Beckett decided he no longer wished to press charges and the case was dropped. 

This story is open to a very obvious Christian interpretation. Only Beckett, of course, was not a Christian. In fact, according to one commentator: "Christianity is Samuel Beckett's fundamental antagonist: his thought, his aesthetics and his writing cannot be fully understood in isolation from his lifelong struggle with it." [5]

 

Beckett was thus a writer working within the shadow of self-proclaimed anti-Christ Friedrich Nietzsche, rather than the shadow of the Cross (although I'm sure that there are significant differences to be drawn between the two authors) [6].

 

And so I think the tale of Beckett and Prudent the Pimp might best be understood with reference to Nietzsche; a philosopher who wishes to have done with judgement and conceives of revenge as something that should only be found in the souls of venomous spiders, not men. Only a human tarantula who lives in a cave of lies and deals in hidden revengefulness mistakes the latter for justice. 

"'That man may be freed from the bonds of revenge: that is the bridge to my highest hope,'" says Zarathustra [7]. 

 

And it seems that Beckett shares his arachnophobia and mistrusts all in whom the urge to punish is strong.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This portrait - done in the style of Jamie Reid's 'God Save ...' series of posters for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple and starring the Sex Pistols, 1980), features a teenaged Sam Beckett in 1920, looking like a punky link between Arthur Rimbaud and Shane MacGowan.

 

[2] See Jane Hardy, 'Stand aside, David Beckham - now Samuel Beckett is turning heads', in the Belfast Telegraph (6 July, 2012): click here. 

 

[3] Theo Coetzer, 'Bibliophile Style: Samuel Beckett', on the menswear blog Habilitate (17 April, 2023): click here. 

      As Coetzer rightly goes on to point out: "The ostensible disregard for appearance implied by wearing the same thing day after day can arguably be rooted in precisely the opposite impulse - a careful consideration, in other words, of what one looks like and the desire to control the messaging of one's clothing."

 

[4] The Croix de Guerre is a French military decoration, created in 1915, and commonly awarded to  foreign fighters allied to France who distinguish themselves by acts of heroism. Like Beckett, the American-born singer, dancer, and actress Josephine Baker was also awarded this medal for her wartime efforts with the Resistance - not something that Simone de Beauvoir could ever boast of. 

      Baker and Beckett were also both awared the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for their efforts in fighting the German occupation. 

 

[5] Erik Tonning, 'Samuel Beckett, Modernism and Christianity', chapter in Modernism and Christianity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 104-123. Lines quoted are on p. 104. 

 

[6] Richard Marshall explores the complexity of the Nietzsche-Beckett relationship in his essay 'Beckett the Nietzschean Hedonist' in 3:AM Magazine (21 April 2013): click here to read online. 

 

[7] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 123.    

 

Click here to read what is effectively part one of this post: And Then What: Random Thoughts on Samuel Beckett (09 October 2024).  

On Subcultural Barbarism

Photo of Soo Catwoman by Ray Stevenson (1976)

The slogan is a paraphrase of a sentence written by Walter Benjamin [1] 

 

"Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion to barbarism? 

Because it would make people unhappier than they are? 

Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier: let us not deceive ourselves!" - Nietzsche [2]

 

 

I. 

 

What constitutes a subculture?

 

I suppose, sociologically speaking, a subculture might be defined as a group of people who identify in terms of their shared tastes, values, interests, and practices whilst, at the same time, differentiating themselves to a greater or lesser degree from the dominant culture and its norms [3].

 

In other words, individuals form or join subcultures because they wish to develop an alternative lifestyle, but not necessarily one that calls for revolution or involves dropping out of society altogether. Such individuals may like to deviate from the straight and narrow, but they acknowledge the existence of a path and in as much as they offer resistance to cultural hegemony it's mostly of a symbolic nature.

 

 

II. 

 

In 1985, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli transformed much of the thinking on subcultures by introducing the idea of neotribalism; a term that gained widespread currency after the publication of his book Le Temps des tribus three years later [4].

 

According to Maffesoli, the conventional approaches to understanding solidarity and society are no longer tenable. He contends that as modern mass culture and its institutions disintegrates, social existence is increasingly conducted through fragmented tribal groupings, informally organised around ideas, sounds, looks, and patterns of consumption.

 

He refers to punk rockers as an example of such a postmodern tribe and, interestingly, suggests that through generating chaos within wider culture they help revitalise the latter in a Dionysian manner [5]. 

 

Maffesoli, of course, is not without his critics and his work is often branded as controversial. However, I think we might relate his thinking on culture, modernity, and tribalism to Nietzsche's philosophy; in particular Nietzsche's longing for new barbarians who might prevent the ossification of culture ...    

 

III. 

 

Anyone who knows anything about Nietzsche knows that he loves Kultur - understood by him as the supreme way of stylising chaos in such a manner that man's highest form of agency (individual sovereignty) is made possible. 

 

In other words, culture is not that which simply allows us to be and does more than merely preserve old identities. Rather, it allows us to become singular, like stars, via a dynamic process of self-overcoming. 

 

Unfortunately, the powers which drive civilisation outweigh the forces of culture to such an extent that history appears to Nietzsche as the process via which the former take possession of the latter or divert them in its favour. 

 

Thus, there's not merely an abysmal antagonism between culture and civilisation [6]; the latter, in Nietzsche's view, co-opts and exploits the more spiritual qualities possessed by a people which have developed organically from within the conditions of their existence. 

 

This becoming-reactive of culture is, as Deleuze reminds us, the source of Nietzsche's greatest disappointment; things begin Greek and end up German as human vitality and creativity becomes overcoded by the coordinating power of the modern state. 

 

So ... what can be done to prevent this or to release the forces of culture once more? How do we free life wherever it is encased within a fixed form? In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche famously calls for a cultural revolution, only to quickly realise that this ain't gonna happen. 

 

And so Nietzsche changes tack and instead of pinning his hopes on an alliance between artists and philosophers to save the day, he invokes a breed of new barbarians who, via subcultural activity, cast off the horny covering of civilisation so that new growth becomes possible and who, when confronted with the ways in which the dominant social order breaks down, "make no attempt at recodification" [7]. 

 

Of course, the question that arises is where will these new barbarians come from. This was a question that troubled D. H. Lawrence as well as Nietzsche, for both recogised that despite the modern world being very full of people there were no longer "any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life" [8] existing outside the gate.

 

And so, we will need our barbarians to come from within - although not from the depths, so much as from the heights. For Nietzsche's new barbarians are not merely iconoclasts driven by a will to destruction, rather, they're cynics and experimenters; "a species of conquering and ruling natures in search of material to mold" [9] who embody a "union of spiritual superiority with well-being and excess of strength" [10]. 

 

The question of culture and subcultural barbarism is badly conceived if considered only in terms of 'Anarchy in the UK' (and I say that as a sex pistol): what's required is what Adam Ant would term a wild nobility.

 

 

IV.

 

To believe in the ruins, doesn't mean that one wishes to stay forever among the ruins; a permanently established barbarism would simply be another oppressive system of philistine stupidity. Eventually, we have to start to build up new little habitats; cultivating new forms and new ideas upon discord and difference (i.e., stylising chaos).

One of the key roles of the Subcultures Interest Group [11] is to both document and inspire such activity by rediscovering something of the creative energy or potential that lies dormant in the past and projecting such into the future so that we might live yesterday tomorrow (as Malcolm would say) [12].

 

That's not easy: and it's not simply a question of revivalism; it's neither possible nor desirable to go back to an earlier time and mode of existence (despite what the writers of Life on Mars might encourage us to believe) [13]. 

 

It involves, rather, a few brave souls working with knowing mystery for "the resurrection of a new body, a new spirit, a new culture" [14] and accepting back into their lives "all that has hitherto been forbidden, despised, accursed" [15] ... (i.e., becoming-barbarian).    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This famous sentence from Benjamin's 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' (1940) actually reads: "There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." 

      This essay, composed of twenty numbered paragraphs, was first translated into English by Harry Zohn and included in the collection of essays by Benjamin entitled Illuminations, ed. Hanah Arendt (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968). 

      Alternatively, it can be found under the title 'On the Concept of History' in Vol. 4 of Benjamin's Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 389-400. See paragraph VII on p. 392. 

 

[2] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1982), V. 429, p. 184.

 

[3] Those whose opposition to or rejection of the mainstream is actually their defining characteristic are probably best described as countercultural militants rather than simply members of a subculture.

 

[4] Le Temps des tribus: le déclin de l'individualisme dans les sociétés de masse was translated into English by Don Smith as The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, (SAGE Publications Ltd., 1995). 

[5] In other words, as a polemologist, Maffesoli is attracted to the idea of foundational violence and the vital need for conflict within society. See his 1982 work L’ombre de Dionysos: contribution à une sociologie de l'orgie, trans. into English by Cindy Linse and Mary Kristina Palmquist as The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy (State University of New York Press, 1993). 

      Readers might find a post published in February of this year on Sid Vicious of interest, as it explores the Dionysian aspects of the young Sex Pistols' tragic death: click here.  

 

[6] Nietzsche maintained a common opposition within German letters between Kultur and Zivilization, defining the latter in terms of scientific and material progress, whilst insisting the former was invested with a more spiritual quality (Geist). See, for example, note 121 in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), p. 75.

 

[7] Gilles Deleuze, 'Nomad Thought', in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (The MIT Press, 1992), p. 143. 

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 189.

 

[9] Nietzsche, The Will to Power ... IV 900, p. 479. 

 

[10] Ibid., IV 899, p. 478. 

      Nietzsche makes several remarks on barbarians and barbarism in his published work, not just in his Nachlass. See, for example, Beyond Good and Evil where he identifies barbarians as culture-founders; "their superiority lay, not in their physical strength, but primarily in their psychical - they were more complete human beings" (9. 257). Translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), p. 192. 

[11] The Subcultures Interest Group (SIG) is a diverse and informal collective of academics and artists operating out of the University of the Arts London. Established in 2019, they regularly publish a paper - SIG News - which aims to open a window on to the work being undertaken by members of the Group. Click here for further information. For a review of  SIG News 3 on Torpedo the Ark (28 July 2024), click here for part one of the post and/or here for part two  

 

[12] See the post published on Torpedo the Ark dated 10 June 2024: click here.

 

[13] Life on Mars is a British TV series, first broadcast on BBC One (2006-07), devised and written by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah, and starring John Simm as Detective Inspector Sam Tyler, who, following a car accident, wakes up to find himself in 1973. See the post published on 2 October 2024 in which I discuss this seductive (but ultimately fatal) fantasy: click here.   

 

[14] Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, ed. Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teunissen (John Calder (Publishers) Ltd., 1985), p. 217.  

 

[15] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1988), p. 96.

 

 

With continued gratitude to Keith Ansell-Pearson whose work on Nietzsche helped shaped my own thinking 30 years ago.

 

 

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 1: Propositions 1-120

 Jonathan Cape (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do also have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which Christian Dior identified as the only one which can possibly compete with black: blue. 

 

This includes, for example, the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; the blue of the Greater Day that D. H. Lawrence writes of; and my fascination with this colour extends to blue angels, blue boys, blue lenses, and blue lagoons.  

 

Thus, no surprise then that I should eventually get around to reading Maggie Nelson's wonderful little book Bluets ...

 

 

II. 

 

First published by Wave Books in 2009, Bluets consists of 240 numbered propositions arranged not so much randomly, but with what we might term considered whimsicality to create the illusion of logical precision and continuity à la Wittgenstein. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph; none exceeds two hundred words in length.

 

The book documents not only the author's bowerbird-like obsession with the colour blue, referencing many famous figures along the way associated with the colour, but also provides an insight into Nelson's understanding of love and mental health and examines what role - if any - beauty plays in times of heartache or depression.

 

In 2016, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - known to many as the genius grant - and, on the basis of this one book alone I think that Nelson is indeed one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical.  

 

The title doesn't refer us simply to those small and delicate blue flowers belonging to the genus Houstonia, but also to a triptyque by the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets (1973), which Nelson describes as perhaps her "favourite painting of all time" [a]

 

Here, I would like to provide a commentary on the book, picking up on some of the things that particularly resonate with me or pique my curiosity to know more. Hopefully, in the course of doing so I can demonstrate why the author and critic Hilton Als was spot on to praise Bluets as a "new kind of classicism" that, whilst queer in content, remains elegant in form [b].     

 

 

III.

5

 

Are we to understand that when, like Mallarmé, one replaces le ceil with l'Azur - "in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations" - one ceases to be a crypto-theologian and becomes a poet-philosopher? 

 

Is it true to say: whereof one can perceive blueness, thereof one cannot imagine God ...     

 

 

18

 

"A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck."

 

For a moment I thought I was reading Young Kim's A Year on Earth with Mr Hell (2020). 

 

But then I read the three sentences following: 

 

"Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my seceret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence."  

And realised I wasn't.  

 

20 

 

"Fucking leaves everything as it is." 

 

This is a very un-Lawrentian sentence; perhaps the most un-Lawrentian sentence you could imagine. 

 

For Lawrence insists that, on the contrary, fucking is transformational of the individual - changing the very constitution of the blood - and that a politics of desire, founded upon the act of coition, has revolutionary potential. 

 

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believes that the lover is richer and stronger than those who do not fuck; that lovers grow wings and possess new capabilities. And there arises, he says, a post-coital "craving for polarized communion with others" [c] - not just for cigarettes. 

 

 

26 / 31

 

Nelson says that she's heard that "a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression" and I couldn't help wondering if that's true; if feeling blue ironically makes the world seem greyer ...?

 

Well, apparently, it is: depression lowers the production of dopamine and this can impair neurotransmitters in the retina, making the world appear less vibrant and colourful. 

 

But then Nelson reminds us of the case of Mr Sidney Bradford, who had his vision restored in his fifties (having lost his sight as a baby) and saw the world at last in full-colour:  he died of unhappiness due to disappointment soon afterwards [d].      

 

35

 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?", asks Nelson, before concluding that's probably not the case. 

 

But, like her, I like to imagine it does.

 

 

56

 

When reminded of Saint Lucy - patron saint of the blind, who was tortured and put to death by the Romans in 304 CE - I can't help thinking of Simone, the teenage erotomaniac at the heart of Bataille's notorious short novel L'histoire de l'œil (1928). 

 

For whilst Lucy didn't - as far as I know - insert the eye of a murdered priest into her vagina, she is often depicted in "Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it".   

 

Depending on what sources one refers to, Lucy's eyes were either gouged out by her captors, or she removed them herself in order to avoid male attention and prove her religious devotion. For as Nelson writes, there are numerous stories of women "blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity" and to demonstrate their fidelity to God (i.e., the fact that they 'only have eyes' for Christ).   

 

 

62

 

Nelson's definition of puritanism: the exchanging of corporeal reality for ideal representation. Not something that appeals to her: 

 

"I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses ..."  

 

Fair enough: but this is still an image conjured up with words, is it not? And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: Words do not look like the things they designate [e].  

 

 

71 / 72 

 

Hard to find dignity in loneliness; easier to find it in solitude. A pair of propostions of such high truth value that we may for all intents and purposes declare them true.  

 

 

101

 

When Nelson's friends were asked "how much time they would grant between 'a blinding, bad time' and a life that has simply become a depressive waste", the consensus was "around seven years". 

 

I suspect - based on my own experience between April 2016 and February 2023 - that that's probably about right; that the seven year mark is the limit. Perhaps that's why when a person goes missing there is a presumption of death after seven years. 

 

(As for how long it takes to fully recover having reached one's limit, that's a question to which neither Nelson nor her friends provide an answer and I suspect it might take longer to retreat from the edge of the abyss than it does to get there.)

Notes

 

[a] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), Prop. 145, p. 57. Note that I will henceforth only give proposition numbers (in bold) in the post.      

 

[b] Hilton Als, 'Immediate Family', The New Yorker (11 April, 2016): click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 135. 

      Later, in proposition 201, Nelson does acknowledge the truth of change, newness, and becoming-other: "I believe n the possibility - the inevitability, even - of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters [...]" (p. 80).

[d] This is a real case, although Nelson is taking artistic license with her conclusion. For whilst Bradford did admit to finding the world visually disappointing following corneal grafts - and did die two years afterwards - he also had chronic health issues and no specific cause of death was entered on his death certificate. 

[e] Nelson quotes this line herself in proposition 70. It can be found in the essay 'Cézanne's Doubt', in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwyn (Routledge, 2003). 

 

This post continues in part two (selected propositions from 121-240): click here. 

On Board the Ship of Theseus With Melissa Mesku

Melissa Mesku and the 

Ship of Theseus

 

 

I. 

 

A correspondent who knows her Greek mythology (and her French literary theory) writes:

 

In a recent post [1] you refer to Roland Barthes's reference to a ship that has each of its parts replaced over time until it has been entirely rebuilt and how this reinforces one of the key principles of structuralism; namely, that an object is not necessarily born of a mysterious act of creation, but can be produced via the substitution of parts and nomination (i.e., the giving of a fixed name that is not tied to the stability of parts). 

      Barthes, however, mistakenly refers to this ship as the Argo, on which Theseus was said to have sailed with Jason. In fact, it was a different vessel (of unknown name) on which the former sailed from Crete that has given rise to the question that has so intrigued philosophers. Probably you know this, but I think a note for general readers might have been useful so as to avoid confusion and the spreading of misinformation.    

 

I'm extremely grateful for this email which arrived overnight and my correspondent is quite right in what she says; both about Barthes's error and my oversight in not fact checking what he wrote and supplying a brief note of correction.    

 

II.

 

Of course, my correspondent is not the first person to have pointed out that this famous French theorist misremembered his Plutarch; Melissa Mesku, for example, also mentioned this in a brilliant piece in Lapham's Quarterly a few years back [2].

 

Founding editor of ➰➰➰ - a website that delights in recursion and weirdness [3] - Melissa Mesku is someone I greatly admire for daring to celebrate divergence rather than diversity and I thought it might be fun to examine her ideas in the above essay on Theseus's Paradox ...

 

 

III.

 

As Mesku reminds us, Theseus was the mythical hero who famously slayed the minotaur and returned victorious from Crete on a ship that the good people of Athens decided to preserve for posterity; removing old timber as it decayed and replacing it with new wood. 

 

Perhaps inevitably, this soon attracted the attention of the philosophers, who wanted to know if, after many years of such maintenance, the vessel that remained was essentially still the same ship. Some thought it was; others that it wasn't - and philosophers have been arguing over the Ship of Theseus ever since, inspiring many modern ideas to do with the persistence of identity and the return of the same. 

 

Thus, whether this tale has any historical basis or is simply an invention of Plutarch's doesn't really matter, although Mesku is keen to point out that Plutarch "is known for taking liberties as a biographer, and most of his source texts have been lost to time". Further, she adds, the veracity of Plutarch's story "seems especially dubious when we consider that Theseus himself likely never existed". 

 

Leaving the question of whether he was or was not an actual figure, Mesku rightly points out that "the conundrum of how things change and stay the same has been with us a lot longer than Plutarch". Plato, for example, certainly addressed the problem; as did pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, to whom it was clear that you can never step in the same river twice. 

 

Two-and-a-half thousand years later, and philosophers are still puzzling their brains over this, although folksy American thinkers often prefer to articulate the question with reference to an axe belonging either to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln depending on who you ask. Followers of John Locke, meanwhile, prefer to think things in relation to an old sock [4] ...!

 

 

IV.

Moving on, Mesku returns us to Maggie Nelson's reference in The Argonauts (2015) to Roland Barthes's discussion of love and language. For Nelson, the Argo functions as a foundational metaphor - retaining what Barthes imparted to it, but also expanding as "a metaphor for the paradox of selfhood, of the 'I' which is immutable yet undergoes constant change". 

 

Since this is where my interest mostly lies - rather than with the work of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei or the ancient Japanese method of pottery repair using gold lacquer - I think I'll close this post here if I may. 

 

Like Mesku, I'm amused at how changes to Theseus's Paradox have only "augmented its paradoxical nature", whilst leaving us still faced with the question of "just how much change something can withstand without it changing into something else".

 

As a Nietzschean, however, i.e., someone who has stamped becoming with the character of being [5], it's not particularly concerning to realise that the eternal return of the same is an illusion and that what actually returns is difference.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The post referred to was entitled 'Argonauts' and published on 27 August 2024: click here.  

 

[2] Melissa Mesku, 'Restoring the Ship of Theseus: Is a paradox still the same after its parts have been replaced?', Lapham's Quarterly (21 Oct 2019): click here to read online. Lines quoted in this post are from this digital version of the work.  

[3] ➰➰➰ (spoken as 'many loops') is a website launched in 2019 that publishes prose, fiction, poetry, photo essays, and artwork alongside various hybrid forms and is preoccupied with the concept of recursion - something which Mesku explains far better than I can here.   

 

[4] Mesku suggests that Locke's version of Thesus's Paradox holds up as a metaphor and might even be preferable with a contemporary audience: "Except for one small problem. Scholars are unable to locate any references to socks in Locke's work." Despite this, it has become, according to Mesku, "the current identity paradox par excellence". 

      Personally, I think Hobbes rather than Locke provides us with a far more interesting development of Theseus's Paradox in De Corpore (1655), where, he asks: What if the discarded parts of the original ship were not destroyed, but collected and used to create a second ship? Mesku notes: "As a thought experiment, Hobbes' version solicits different philosophical proofs and can float on its own like the second ship it posits. Yet it is considered to be a mere addition, a twist - just another plank on Theseus' ship."

 

[5] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), III. 617, p. 330. Nietzsche opens the section with the following line: "To impose upon becoming the character of being - that is the supreme will to power."

Readers interested in reading the 'Life of Theseus' should see Vol. 1 of Plutarch's Lives, trans. Aubrey Stewart and George Long (George Bell & Sons, 1894). Click here to access it as a Project Gutenberg eBook (2004) based on this edition. Section XXIII is the key section for those interested in the fate of his thirty-oared ship once it reached Athens.

 

 

Argonauts

Lorenzo Costa: The Argo

(detail of a panel painting c. 1480–90) 

Civic Museum, Padua, Italy

 

 

I. 

 

As everybody knows, the Ἀργοναῦται were the heroic crew aboard the good ship Argo who, sometime before the Trojan War kicked off, accompanied Jason on his quest to find the Golden Fleece, protected by the goddess Hera.  

 

Whether there is any historical basis to this ancient Greek myth - or whether it was pure fiction - is debatable, but hardly important. It remains, factual or not, central within the Western cultural imagination and, in the modern world, the term argonaut refers to anyone engaged in any kind of quest of discovery ...

 

 

II.       

 

For Nietzsche, a philosophical argonaut was one who continually sought out what he terms die große Gesundheit - that is to say, a form of well-being way beyond the bourgeois model of good health we've been given and endlessly told we have to protect; a form of well-being that doesn't make us superhuman, but, on the contrary, allows us to conceive of that which lies overman. 

 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes this new and greater type of health as "more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health" [1] and he argues that anyone who wishes like an artist-philosopher to experience every desire and sail round the dangerous coastal regions of the soul, needs this great health above all else.    

Argonauts of the spirit, who stand divinely apart from others and who "with more daring than is prudent" risk disastrous shipwrecks, will eventually come upon "an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed [...] a world so overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine" that to return home no longer holds the slightest attraction.

 

 

III.

 

In 2015, the genre-defying American writer Maggie Nelson published her award-winning and best-selling book The Argonauts; a series of autotheoretical reflections on desire, identity, family, etc.

 

For Nelson, the term refers to one who sets out to explore (in a quasi-Barthesian manner [2]) the possibilities (and limitations) of love and language and she discusses in detail her relationship with the transgender artist Harry Dodge, with whom she lives in Los Angeles. 

 

This queering of the term Argonaut is certainly an interesting development and one wonders what Apollonius would have made of it ...? 

 

Of course, as almost nothing is known about this ancient Greek author who composed the epic poem about Jason and his quest to locate the Golden Fleece in the 3rd century BC - the Argonautika - it's impossible to answer this question. 

 

However, as Apollonius was clearly interested in the pathology of love, I'm fairly confident he'd approve of Nelson's "always questioning, sometimes wonderfully lyrical" [3] attempt to document the series of bodily experiments she and Harry engage in in order to construct a happy and rewarding life [4]. He might even recognise Nelson's book as belonging to a classical genre of literature that deals with queer phenomena: paradoxography. 

 

The literary critic and cultural historian Lara Feigel rightly identifies the question that haunts Nelson's book; namely, can a love that claims to be radically-other or queer unfold within a conventional domestic setting? Or, to put it another way: can one be a sexually and socially transgressive Argonaut and also a regular mom?

 

Although she attempts to get round this by insisting that "queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation" [5], Nelson remains "conscious of the dangers of 'homonormativity' [...] and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the LGBTQ world, the less that world will "'be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe'" [6].

 

Perhaps that's the ultimate sign of the Argonaut: someone who wants the best of both worlds; someone who thinks it reasonable to demand the impossible ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft (1887), V. 382. I am using the English translation by Walter Kaufmann published as The Gay Science (Vintage Books, 1974). See pp. 346-347. Lines quoted here are on p. 346. 

[2] According to Nelson, the title is a reference to Barthes's idea that two people in a long-term love affair have to continually renew things without changing the form of their relationship - i.e., a bit like the Argonauts had to gradually replace each piece of their ship. Nelson expresses her surprise and joy at the manner in which love can be forever renewed. 

      See the sections Le vaisseau Argo and Le travail du mot in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Papermac, 1995), pp. 46 and 114. 

 

[3] Lara Feigel ...'The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson review - a radical approach to genre and gender' The Guardian (27 March 2016): click here. 

 

[4] Whilst Maggie busies herself becoming pregnant with a sperm donor, Harry undergoes a bilateral mastectomy and begins taking testosterone. 

 

[5-6]  Lara Feigel ... op. cit. 

 

 

Fot a follow up post to this one - on board the Ship of Theseus with Melissa Mesku - click here. 

 

I am grateful to Maria Karouso whose blog post on the Greek poet Seferis and mythic history inspired this one: click here.